Progress Report

Hey, all. It's three-thirty in the morning, and I'm kinda stuck for something to do while my back gets into a fit state to return to bed. I realized that I've been neglecting the old blog. I do have a number of ideas for posts, but they're all fairly heavy essays, ones which would require my actually thinking about them ahead of time, possibly even giving them a second draft before posting.

Thing is, is that lately I've been fixated on the novel. I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of the way through this draft, and honestly? I'm doing what feels like the best writing of my life. It's certainly a distinct step up from the last version. What I learned at Taos Toolbox is paying off, big time.

It's having an interesting second effect as well. Because my work is better, all of a sudden a whole different class of flaws has become apparent -- and by addressing them, there's another level of improvement. This is why I love the arts. I'm a damned good prose stylist, and I have a hell of a lot of room for improvement. What more could you ask for?

I was initially worried that I was hurting the novel or, on some ridiculous level, selling out by making the decision to write it as commercial fiction. Instead, I'm finding that a) this shit is to weird to be domesticated, and b) working within a conventional form has clarified the material in ways I'd never expected.

People who have been reading the same passage over and over for years now are actually fucking reading the damned passage. One person just realized the lead character is mentally ill, another that he's an artist -- that kind of thing.

By pruning away everything that does not contribute to the story in a substantial fashion, it forces the reader to take everything in much more conscientiously. My continual struggle to pare down my prose helps with this as well.

One of the main reasons things are working better this time around is because of something that I learned at Taos. I didn't learn it from the teachers; rather, I learned it when there was a particular critique I think I delivered at least once a day and usually two or three times.

"If your plot depends on an imaginary situation, tell us the fucking rules of the situation as soon as possible."

I realized that there was a difference between systematically constructing a world for the reader and being parsimonious with the fucking facts. Then we were given a lesson that cast another light on the situation, and I realized something.

You plot with tension not by withholding information from the reader, but by giving them information as fast as you gracefully can, in the proper order.

So when I started thinking in those terms, on returning to the novel I became aware that certain crucial areas in the story were almost fucking nonexistent. Because I used those moments as opportunities to introduce mystery. By writing fancy.

Fuck me.

So now I'm using every opportunity to give the reader more information about the world, about the characters. I'm looking for the areas where I've got deadwood that's been sitting there for years -- just had a good four, five pages worth pointed out to me last night.

One last thing about plot before I go. I wasn't plotting incorrectly before. I was doing good things. I just hadn't done enough of them. While there were some very specific things I learned about plotting at Taos, the most important were techniques for working harder and more effectively at the task.

Over and over again, this is what I find in the arts. Techniques are good and important and a serious artist pays serious attention to their toolbox.

But nothing. Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing is as important as hard work.

Ghost Rock

This last spring, my pal Deborah and I started sketching outdoors. Here's a blog post she did on the subject. (Yeah, that's me in the bottom photo, and yeah, my back gave me merry hell for a good three weeks after I sat on the ground like that.)

At first I felt as though I'd lost all my drawing abilities and they were never to return, but I've had that feeling plenty of times in the past and it's nothing that hard work can't cure.

Finally, this last time I got in a couple of halfway-decent bits. Nothing impressive, but it's nice to know the old muscles are there. My copy of Painter is screwed up so I had to do this one in Photoshop -- it was fun.

Sorry to have vanished like that. I've been doing some very hard cognitive work. See, when I came back from Taos Toolbox, I was on fire, writing thousands and thousands of words a day, totally re-working the novel from the ground up. I was trashing everything that slowed the reader down, inserting interconnections between sub-plots, really seeing the whole thing at one time.

There was a faint concern -- a paranoia, merely -- that by taking out all the richly observed autobiographical material, I was cutting the guts out of my novel and reducing it to a potboiler mostly notable for the degenerate nature of its lurid subject matter.

But this was but the faintest whisper of doubt. I knew I was on the right track for the first time.

Until I got in my first critique on the new material. One person said it was the best I'd done so far, hands down.

The other person hated it. I mean, it was as if the lead character in the book was a friend of hers, and I'd killed him. She was actually upset with me.

This was very interesting. First off, it totally played up to my worries. And secondly, she said that the character came off as being someone who was batshit crazy rather than someone who was coping with mental illness.

Interestingly, all the material I cut consisted of fairly unpleasant episodes of mental illness. And yet removing them threw the balance of the story off in ways I hadn't expected.

The woman who was bothered by my revisions is the least experienced writer I work with, and she was reacting emotionally rather than intellectually, which was unusual for her. She wasn't able to say exactly what I had done that wrecked things for her -- only the effect that it had on her.

This may have had to do with the fact that she's also the least experienced reader I work with. She and I met in class, hit it off, and wound up becoming friends. She was a non-reader, former non-writer who was trying out writing for personal reasons. While she's since started reading for pleasure, it's still a new thing in her life -- which made her strong reaction that much more interesting to me. I'll be honest. It messed with my head -- I was convinced I sucked.

The next set of reviews was very positive, and that came as a great relief. But one person thought the pace was too rushed.

So I thought. And thought. Lay in bed in the dark and thought, thought while I washed potatoes. And then something Nancy Kress had mentioned at Taos Toolbox came to mind. I won't go into it in detail -- I suggest you attend next year -- but the basic idea is that there are aspects of fiction that you have to pay the reader to plow through. And you earn the cash to do that by giving the reader dialog.

The draft of the novel in questions started off with six pages before there's any dialog.

I also remembered something my sister had said. She was in conversation with the missus.

The missus said, "It's really a compelling read (yes, she said that for real), but it's so disturbing."

"Well, it puts you right inside Sean's head." My sister turned to me. "You know, your head is a really shitty place."

Those first six pages took place inside the protagonist's head. Right, right, right. He doesn't like himself, the reader gets sick of him fast. What makes the reader like Matt? Seeing him interact with his friends.

So I went back and inserted an extensive dialog section between the protagonist and his best friend, resubmitted it, and it passed. There is some grumbling that the pace might still be too fast at first, but frankly? I think 'you could slow down a little at the start' is the kind of advice an editor would love to give an author.

I can't tell you how it felt to be able to do that. To get a complaint, analyze the work, and arrive at a successful solution to the creative problem. I felt like a regular pro there. Thank you, Taos Toolbox!

So the first chapter is nearing completion. I mailed it off to the hon. Mr. Richard Talleywhacker for one last set of grammar and punctuation edits, and then I am through with it until it's been through a brace of agents, damn their eyes.

Thing is, is that I had to go back and do a major rewrite on that chapter even after it passed muster. I realized that my lead character had an out-0f-body experience in the first chapter and nowhere else in the book. So I had to fix that.

I'm at the point where there are fine details of worldbuilding that are now becoming very important. I just spent three days where, while I did plenty of other stuff, the bulk of my energy was spent imagining the topography of my imaginary world. I thought I'd already nailed it, but the current plotting is tight enough to demand new levels of detail in order to maintain continuity. I have been busting my nuts linking everything, making everything make sense and be consistent. I'm operating at a new level, and it is a pain in the bee-hind.

I mean, dang. This stuff is hard. But it's paying off. On Monday, the dude I work with who just got signed by Donald Maass said that this was the first time in all the years he's been working with me that the voice of the novel shows up on the very first page. I knew what he meant, and I was damned glad to hear it.

So among other things, I've been poddling about with the start of a project that hasn't been worth being anything but secret up until now. I'll tell you about it soon.

Trilobite!

I believe I may have neglected to send you to the latest Art Evolved extravaganza, The Trilobite Gallery. Go on, check it out.

The Final Stage Commences

From time to time the missus says, "You're starting to look like your self-portrait." This is the self-portrait she means. I'm waiting to start two major projects -- the place mats and the illustrations for Swill -- so I figured I may as well start another large-scale print. This should be fairly horrific by the time I'm done.

So today I did the last advance plotting I'm going to do before beginning the novel. If I find elements I need to track as I go along, I'll be sure and do so. But right now I've got a nice fat stack of file cards in a clip and they tell me that I've got a novel to write.

(The fact that most of those cards were written in felt pen by Walter Jon Williams is a thrill -- hey, everybody! The best plotter in SF helped me plot my novel! So if it sucks, it's pretty much his fault. And if it's any good, well, I suppose the benefit accrues to his name as well. That only seems fair. Except to the roomful of skilled and gifted imaginations that did most of the work. I just stood back and said, "Yeah, that's fucking brilliant," and "No, he/she wouldn't do that," and "Oh, shit, there's this whole other thaaang I never told you bout." Actually, that's what I was doing today. Adding them thaaangs. And for the record, EF Kelley was the one who saved the goddamned novel.)

Anyway.

The main changes are to ditch most of the, "but it really happened!" stuff, to simplify the elements in order to unify the motives behind events, and to increase the cohesion and sense of connection between events.

In other words, I've decided that this is primarily a work of adventure fantasy rather than a thinly-disguised autobiography. I've been schooled on the plot and I think it will show. The elements that were most important to me during the mid-stages of creation will all be there, but they won't be as strident and overwhelming. Rather, they're like bay leafs in the stew. Yeah, you've got to have that flavor -- but you don't want to have your guests biting down on bay leafs.

When I was at Taos Toolbox, I was told that I need to rewrite the novel -- but that I need to rewrite it once and then send it out. And that is what I'm going to do.

About the Novel

Here's the cover I've used for print copies over the last few years. Maybe it's time to do a new one, one that uses grown-up design instead of this punk stuff.

Before I left for Viable Paradise, I printed up a copy of the novel and had it spiral-bound. I started doing line edits on the flight to Boston; this morning I finished them. I still have to incorporate quite literally thousands of pages of crits from my writer's groups, and The Homework Club has just passed the halfway mark in the manuscript, but the bulk of the work is now done; I'll be able to start revising this week.

This got me thinking about the novel, and the impact it's had on my life. I never intended for it to be this big. My original idea was simple; I wanted to tell an M.R. James-style story about a haunted garage band. This was in 2004.

The story got out of hand. The first version was the longest piece of fiction I'd written at that point. The criticism I got from the original cast of the Monday night group was that the naturalistic scenes were good and the supernatural scenes were good, but they didn't seem to belong in the same story.

At that point I was strongly focused on short fiction. I was at the start of the learning curve, and I needed to be able to experiment. So I set the story aside as a failure, and went on to do other things.

But I kept going back and pecking at it. It was the first fiction I'd written in 'my' voice, the voice I speak with. (The voice of this blog, actually...) When I picked a setting for the initial story, I used the Santa Cruz of my late teens and early twenties, and used myself as the narrator. As I said, I kept pecking at it from time to time, inserting more and more autobiographical details.

After a couple of years it was apparent that I was working on a novel. It became the focus of my creative life without any conscious decision on my part. I had to do it; it was a compulsion.

I've written about this before, but for those who missed out on those hysterical self-pitying posts, I've got fairly serious psychiatric issues. During the years I spent in Santa Cruz, I was suicidal. I was also hallucinating. If I were to literally write about my experiences, it would be like a more depressing version of Communion, and Whitley Strieber's already written that one.

That's something that a lot of people have a hard time with. I've seen Strieber called a liar in print more than once. While I do not believe in the physical existence of visitors from another planet, I can assure you that people do have these kinds of experiences. When you experience a break from reality, its form is shaped by your culture. Other people would have seen Jesus or spies or a dead relative.

These experiences are not without value; the trick is to accept them in a way that allows you to continue to interact with conventional reality. (Which, like Gibson's cyberspace, is a consensual hallucination in its own right.) Because I've had these kinds of experiences, in order to write literally about my life I'm obligated to include elements of the fantastic in my work.

Anyway, at a certain point I realized that the novel was a conversation with three participants. One was myself, the writer. I was addressing myself-the-young-nutbar, telling him to hold on. Telling him he was of value. Telling him that things would get better.

I was also addressing -- shall we call it the feminine principal or should we be honest and say 'every girl in the world?' I was saying, yeah, I'm a man. I'm a big, hairy, trash-talking dangerous stinking animal. Please, tell me there's room for me in world fit for you.

It wasn't until I went through my epiphany at Viable Paradise that I realized the core story I was telling. A wounded man is healed through his determination to be worthy of love.

Writing that sentence brought tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat. That's not just the story of the novel. That's the story of my life. What I hadn't expected was that the novel itself would be an agent of healing.

Part of this has occurred through the act of writing itself; I've come to understand myself in a way that would not have been otherwise possible. I've come to realize that I'm much more of an intuitive person than an intellectual one, for instance. By regarding the protagonist of the novel with sympathy, I was able to begin the process of having sympathy for myself -- and without that grounding, my recent transformation would not have been possible.

Beyond that, it's changed my relationship with the missus immeasurably. After my back went out on me, she'd begun to regard me poorly. She hates it when I'm weak, and my inability to find a place in the world due to my disability led her to a certain attitude of contempt. It wasn't that she was going to dump me, but she was permanently impatient with me. To be blunt, she had no respect for me as a man. Which, naturally, went hand-in-hand with my contempt for the masculine, and my loathing of it in myself. We weren't in a downhill spiral, there was a lot of good in our relationship, but it was deeply flawed.

But a couple of years ago, she started reading the manuscript on impulse. She couldn't stop. And when she got to the end her reaction was to be furious that she didn't have the whole story. (I treasure the image of her shaking the manuscript at me and saying, "Look at these pages! They're double-spaced! There's hardly any words here!")

After that, her whole attitude toward me changed. She saw something in me not just worthy of love, but worthy of admiration. She saw value in the work I did, and in my dedication to my chosen art. (She still wishes I'd focus entirely on writing, but I think she's coming to understand that it's just part of the creative stew and that I need to do everything I do.) As a result, our relationship has grown, deepened, and strengthened. And again, her changed attitude helped make it possible for me to grow.

So now I have a new hope for the novel, one that goes beyond being readable or salable. I hope that some of the healing that the book is about, that the book has given to Karen and myself, carries through. That in some way it can be an agent for positive change in others. That it can make life better for someone else.

Part of me feels like an idiot for feeling that way. But the rest of me is working hard to try and make that hope come true. Every comma, every word, every tiny detail is there to bring that sense of hope, of growth, of healing and love to the reader.

Plus, there's a knife-fight with a two-headed dead guy.

Viable Paradise

My first venture into the exciting world of hypernurbs. When Galactus throws a teaparty...

So I'm probably not going to be doing a lot of blogging this next week. I'm off to attend the Viable Paradise writer's workshop on Martha's Vineyard. Seven pro writers and editors, twenty-seven other neophyte writers, and me.

Due to a combination of class deadlines and general paralysis, I am nowhere near as prepared as I would have liked to have been. My query letter is flabby, I have no synopsis, my outlines need work... but fuckit. They aren't expecting me to spring the damned novel on them anyway.

I am frightened of the trip, I'm looking forward to the workshop. It'll all be fine. I'm certain that once I'm actually in the process I'll feel great. It's the anticipation that's killing me.

So now I have to cut my hair, then head downtown and have a copy of the current draft of the novel spiral-bound.

I'll do one set of edits on it on the flight in, then go over it again on the flight home, then do at least two chapters of revision a day until it's all done. At that point it'll just be a matter of sending it through Homework Club for the final polish.

And at that point I'll be working on the next volume with the Monday night krew. That's going to be tricky. I've finished the first volume, I have a solid outline of the third, but for the second all I have is a bunch of scenes that have already been written (yeah, I've written a couple of drafts of volume two already -- but things have changed so much that most of that work is going to be discarded), and a list of all the shit that needs to happen. I need to organize this into a real plot.

I suspect that what I learn at Viable Paradise will help me with that.

I Finished!

Today I finished the last major revision of the novel. I'm going to run it through the Homework Club for line edits and then start marketing it. Four years, and they have been a crazy four years. Of course, this is just the first volume of three...

So here's a taste of today's work. To fill you in, the Deacon from the last post has given Matt a gun that might be able to take out the ghost in Matt's house, and Matt's buddy Willy peer-pressured him into trying smokeable speed. Nothing like an armed lunatic on crank, is there? (Again, all rights reserved, copyright Sean Craven, and do I really strike you as the kind of guy you'd want to plagiarize?)

I turned the knob of the door and stepped into the entry hall. I could see the white of the walls, the tobacco-spit brown of the ratty shag carpet and the patterned yellow floor of the kitchen.

“Jeff!” I said. “Here I am!”

I held the gun up, barrel pointed at the ceiling, and stepped into the living room. I stood under the broken fixture and screamed at the stubs of the burst light bulbs.

“You want me? You want to get me? Here I am!”

I pointed the gun at the fixture and almost pulled the trigger; impatience snagged at me and I went to the kitchen and stood under the milk-glass dome of the overhead light and tipped my head back, exposed my throat.

“Come on! Fuck you, fuck you, FUCK YOU COME ON!”

The natural rage born of my body and mind swept past the speed and overwhelmed it and my muscles locked and froze. I stood there, arms spread, gun in hand, head tipped back. All of a sudden my pose made me think of Christ on the cross and I felt ridiculous, which made me madder. I stomped hard and fast into James and Dierdre’s room.

My left hand thumped rhythmic dents in the plasterboard of the hallway as I went. I hesitated for a moment at the door – it’s not my room – then stepped in and pulled the hamper to one side and lay on the floor and screamed into the socket that had powered the alarm clock.

“Are you fucking scared of me? Get out here, you fucking chickenshit get out here get out here get out!”

Inside me I felt chains and gears locked and running, ready to cut, and I tasted blood in my mouth. I jerked back and forth and kicked at the floor, rage filling me to overflowing. I wanted to feel something give way and my flesh was all I had.

I slammed my hand into the wall by the outlet and hit a stud. The whole house shook. I punched the other side and put a hole in the wallboard, then gnawed the tatters off my skinned knuckles.

Then, just like in the kitchen, I saw myself. Rolling around on the floor, punching holes in the walls, cutting myself from the inside. Throwing a tantrum. Pitching a fit.

This ridiculous petulant creature was me.

The energy drained out of me like water from a sieve and I lay on the floor, weak and twitching and helpless. I couldn’t stay here; it wasn’t my place. I was the intruder in this room. I rolled over and crawled until I could stand, then set the hamper back where it belonged. I got up and walked out and shut the door, the weight of the gun dragging my arm down. I went into my room and lay down on my waterbed.

As I lay on the soft, yielding surface the initial bob and slowly dying waves were followed by stillness.

I wanted a bong hit; I wanted a million bong hits. I knew this wasn’t the time.

The feeling of water beneath me brought me back to my time floating in the pool. If I was there I would be forgiven. The thought made my throat ache and my eyes water; I hate to cry. It hurts and it’s ugly and it makes me feel weak.

In the silence I heard the bullets singing. This wasn’t all about me. I wasn’t the center of the world. I took the gun and slipped the catch and opened it, tilted the chamber and let the bullet fall on my chest.

I dropped the gun to the side of me and held the bullet to my ear and listened. It made me think of the story of the ants and the grasshopper; this would be the last song the grasshopper played as the snow came down. Whoever this had been had led a small life and the Deacon thought that…

It wasn’t my place to judge the Deacon. He had to fight monsters with what he had and I couldn’t know what brought him to do what he did.

But I knew that I could not take someone whose weakness and misfortunes had led them to become a soft, helpless monster and use them, destroy them to destroy something else.

I was no better than they were. But if I tried, if I worked hard, I might be able to avoid being worse.

I remembered the last words Jeff had said when he and Arnie came into my room that first time in the Limbus. “Don’t do it, Arnie.” The words I’d heard from him just now. “I can’t find Arnie.” It had been bad having Jeff in the house but what had he done to me, really?

I pulled the other bullets out of my pocket and lined them all up on my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I hoped Jeff could hear me.

What was I going to do? What was I…

And that’s when it hit me. When a problem is more than you can handle you have to break it down into smaller parts and deal with them one at a time. What was I going to do was really two questions.

What kind of man do I want to be?

And what would he do?

Blues For Willy

This weekend is going to be devoted to the novel. Yeah! I'm planning on posting a few tastes as I go along. But Word is being a pain in the butt; even when I save my files as text only it puts a bunch of weird HTML in the mix when I try to cut and paste into Blogspot. I realy hate Word. As soon as I'm done with this project I'm switching to another program and and will never let Microsoft darken my hard-drive again. And while I shouldn't have to say this, all contents copyright Sean Craven. Got to get me one of them Creative Commons stickers to put on the blog.

To give you some context, our lead character Matt has just finished an orgy of Lady Macbeth-style cleaning. He's still in shock from having gotten into a knife-fight with a two-headed dead guy.

I heard the front door. Willy came down the hall and into my room. He looked around at the vast expanses of visible carpet.

“Shit, dude. You all right?” He looked at my face and didn’t wait for an answer. “Man, I know what you need. Grab your bass.”

“What are you doing home so soon?”

“Dierdre said I had to check up on you. So you ain’t even gonna give me a bong hit?”

I passed him the bong and lighter; he took a hit and handed it back to me. He started for the door and I sat still so he turned around again.

“Will you pick up your fuckin bass and come on? Bring your stand too.”

“Okay.”

I followed him out to the van. It was cool in the shade and warm in the sun. The breeze off the bay carried a faint scent of kelp and brine to mingle with the jasmine. Willy opened the van and started messing around with cables and the mixing board and the amp.

“Go get a couple of chairs, will you?”

I set my bass on its stand and got a pair of plastic patio chairs and wiped them off. When I set them down next to the van Willy handed me a cable.

“Plug in and give me an E so I can get your sound levels right.”

I took my pick – thick black plastic I’d gouged up with a matte knife so it would have a grip – and hit the E, let it ring, then started playing a slow pulse. I’d never played through a real amp before. The air in front of the speakers turned into thick bass soup and every time I hit the string I felt it pulse all the way through my body. It was like playing a guitar and a kick drum at the same time. I had the power to stir people’s guts with the tip of my finger.

“You better turn that down,” I said.

“It’s the middle of the fucking afternoon,” Willy said. “Everyone’s at work and if anyone isn’t? Fuck them. You need this, man. You need this.”

Willy plugged into a distortion pedal, got his guitar levels right and sat down in the chair opposite me.

“So do four bars of open E, two of open A, back to E for two bars, then one bar of B seven… well, just a B for you. One more A, two more E, and then start over again.”

Twelve-bar blues, the chord progression that spawned the whole rocking world.

We started off simple. I hit the chords on the pulse, Willy strummed along with me. Then he picked, notes clear like shards of glass gleaming in the swamp mud of the bass. Then he stomped his distortion pedal and the notes caught fire, burned clean through me.

Instead of playing to the pulse I strayed a little early or a little late, syncopated the rhythm to set off Willy’s melody. Inside the structure of the blues, we each knew what the other was going to do. So we could do anything.

He hit a switch on his guitar, changed pickups so his guitar sounded hollow. That brought out the sharp edge of my picking. He played straight rhythm and nodded at me.

The sorry-ass state of my whole fucking useless life settled on my shoulders and in my heart and ran down my arms and into my hands. My breath came easy and slow. I took my time building hooks, little melodic figures that grabbed at the ear and held on. I hit notes that weren’t in the scales. Notes that were wrong.

So wrong they were right. They hurt and I liked it.

I took the simplest hook, repeated it over the changes, and gave Willy a nod. He flipped the switch again and played bursts of speed-freak heavy-metal rapid-fire note explosions, then chords that moaned as he slid his left hand up and down the neck of his guitar…

We played for hours, pausing when my hands got tired – his never wore out. Willy was right. I felt better. Not clean, but ready to deal with things. I was going to live but it didn’t seem like a tragedy. Willy grinned at me as we let our last notes ring.

“That didn’t suck, man.”

“Thanks, Willy. I never did that before.”

“Yeah, that’s the power of the blues.”

When he said that he looked really, really white but hey. I was in no position to argue. His blues had done right by me.

Willy set his guitar in its stand.

“Listen,” he said. “There’s something about Lulu you need to know.”

It's Magic Realism

I don't even know why I hang out with these guys.

One issue that I've been concerned with as regards my novel has to do with marketing. Or taxonomy. I've written about genre before, on its origins, its relationship with literature, and some of the things I like about it. But last week, when an agent asked the question, "What genre is your novel-in-progress?" on his blog, I had no good answer. Here's what I wrote in a comment on his post.

I think my novel holds together as one solid entity but when I analyze it in terms of genre?

Total schizophrenia.

My main interest is in character and prose style, so maybe it's literary.

But it's based on my life experiences, so there's a strong element of confessional memoir to it.

It does feature adventures in which an alternate fantasy world is saved, so it's obviously quest fantasy.

But the fantastic elements are rationalized in a speculative fashion, so it might be science fiction.

It deals intimately with the nitty-gritty details of life at the bottom of the blue-collar ladder, so it's social realism.

Much of the material is disturbing on levels ranging from the spiritual to the physical, so it's horror.

It's intended to be funny and there's rarely a lot of space between jokes, so it's humor.

One of the central themes is redemption through love, so it's romance.

The plotting and a storyline involving a drug deal are clearly noir.

I was once asked to describe the damned thing in five words. What I came up with was, "Autobiographical horror with sick laughs."

And that's the thing -- since I started the novel by wandering blindly through the wilderness, I wound up chucking in elements from sources ranging from mythology to pop culture. I put in everything I love in a book. Hell, in my comment I didn't even mention that the influence of cyberpunk -- "How fast are you? How dense?", cute fat chicks, ultraviolence, speculative evolution, coming of age, mental illness, garage bands, drug culture, art, moral issues, and surrealism are all important parts of the book.

When his follow-up post pointed out that if you couldn't say what genre you wrote in, other people were going to decide where it was shelved in the bookstore. I had an answer to that -- it gets shelved with Jonathan Carroll, Christopher Moore, and Neil Gaiman.

But what he said made me nervous because I didn't have a name for what I'm doing. You need a label when you enter the marketplace -- and I am bringing this work to the marketplace. Without a label it's hard to sell a book, hard to place a book, and it's much easier for a book to disappear into the cracks.

Well, last night in my writer's group, Deborah said something to the effect of, "My favorite kind of book is magic realism, and this is perfect magic realism."

Click.

Of course, this is kind of an abject realization for me. Because I've spent a certain amount of time bad-mouthing magic realism. Basically, my position has always been, "Magic realism is just a pretentious word for fantasy. Don't fucking try and tell me that Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson deserve to be stuck in the genre ghetto while the fucking Magic Realists get accepted as valid literature."

But recently I've taken to referring to myself as pretentious. Because I am trying as hard as I can to write something of literary value. My focus is on character first, prose style second, and vision third. By vision, I mean the creation of images in the head of the reader. The fantastic elements are there because I love a monster -- but artistically, I'm drawing from mythology, psychology, and surrealism to create my world rather than just, well. Writing up my D&D campaign or doing another fucking vampire novel. Most of the art I've done in the past two years has had the intention of inspiring the novel.

Like I said, I've become a pretentious son-of-a-bitch. And like I said, Magic Realism is pretentious fantasy.

So that's what I'm writing. I'm a Magic Realist.

I feel so dirty. Can I call it Gonzo Magic Realism? Please?

Sidewalk Daisy

You can expect more posts like this now that school's started. Here's a treated photo that I took out at the Albany Bulb. Below is a sample of today's chunk of the novel. Copyright 2009, Sean Craven. As if I should have to say so...

“Hey,” I said, “does the album have a name yet?”

“It’s called Sidewalk Daisy,” Lulu said.

“No it isn’t,” Willy said. “The lead guitarist for an album called Sidewalk Daisy is a twelve-year old girl named Kimberly with a little heart over the i.”

“You get to pick names when you start writing songs,” Lulu said. “So until then you are allowed to shut the fuck up and that is the law.”

To go from hearing Lulu and Willy singing along to an electric guitar to the insane lushness of Sidewalk Daisy was amazing.

Willy’s bluesy guitar could have been recorded any time in the last forty years, but underneath it Lulu’s electronics were like nothing I’ve ever heard — lush, sweet, so complex you couldn’t take them all in. As I listened hard and tried to figure them out, the hairs on my arms rose and my skin prickled. I went back to being lost in the fog, the sound I had followed. I heard the same sound in her music.

The vocals were where Lulu’s background came through. There are places back East where they sing British folk songs in more archaic forms than they do anywhere in England and it’s my guess that Lulu came from one of those places.

At the same time the rhythms and guitar melodies were African, brought over as work chants by the slaves. That was Willy’s contribution. He and Lulu had taken the blues and country ballads and fused them together all over again. It was the birth of rock coming out of a little black laptop.

What's Up With The Oaf

One of my more pressing tasks is making a nice Anomalocaris canadiensis drawing. I put a lot of work into this one last year; shame that it doesn't work.

I neglected -- or rather, was intimidated by -- one of the most striking visual characteristics of the animal, the nasty trident-shaped 'teeth' on its armored feeding tentacles. Or arms. Or jaws. Or whatever the hell they're called.

And the 'flips' on the ends of its 'fins' 'suck.' They make it seem as if the 'fins' are soft, gelatinous. When I went back to study the fossils, it really seemed as if the 'fins' were stiff. And now I can't find the original sketch to try and fix it. Maybe I'll do a cartoony, multi-layered scene, something like the Tyrannosaur image I did around the same time as this.

(Looking at that now, I wish I'd gone ahead and put in the fleeing Edmontosaurs on the left -- the composition is unbalanced without them.)

Right now I'm feeling... well, not exactly overwhelmed. But I've got a hell of a lot going on, and I'm feeling pleasantly pressed.

School has started again. Like an idiot I spaced out the first day of classes, but I've emailed the teacher to let him know what's going on. Who's the teacher? This guy. That's right, I' gonna be taking 3D modeling and animation from an artist whose work I've been familiar with and fond of for years.

I'm also taking an introductory photography class. That's being taught by the woman who taught my Illustrator class last year. That class made me uneasy and defensive, as long-time readers will recall, because the teacher was a fine-arts type, and I had no clear idea of what she thought of me. Well, it turned out that she really dug what I was doing, and by the spring I was a fine-arts type myself. In fact, she and I both had pieces in the same gallery show. So again, there's a sense of connection with the teacher going in.

(It cracked me up -- some guy with an art history degree admired my critical technique and asked me where I'd gotten my training. "There's no training," I told him. "For me, art history is like music theory -- I only know what I couldn't avoid learning.")

The plan is that next semester I'll take a class in Painter, and that by combining photography and 3D with what I already know, I'll be able to execute the kind of realistic illustration that's popular on genre book covers these days. I also want to see if I can use the 3D to do comics -- I've never learned the skill of drawing the same characters over and over again repeatedly, and frankly it sounds like a drag to me. We'll see how that works out.

Of course taking these classes mandates a retail experience. Money will be spent -- gotta get the 3D software, textbooks, and a new camera. I like the one the missus lets me use, but it doesn't produce an image big enough for a large-sized art-quality print. Which I need. It's funny -- I am such a cheapass in my day-t0-day life. I lived for years on $680 a month, total. Believe me, in the East Bay Area that's cheap as hell. But when the time comes to gear up? I don't even care about spending the money. I kind of like being that way. Thrift and luxury, baby.

The reason I'm taking art classes rather than writing classes is because of the novel. I need to keep that part of my brain freed-up. And the novel is chugging along. I'm working on three layers of line edits at the same time. I line-edit forty page chunks, then send them to the Monday night group. I revise, and then send fifteen-page chunks to the Homework club. Then I revise again and hope it's good enough for an agent. It's actually moving pretty quickly -- the next section going out to the Monday night group will take them well past the halfway mark. It's a matter of weeks before they're done with it.

I want to be able to put together a submission package before October. That would be the first three chapters, a synopsis of the whole first volume, briefer synopses of volumes two and three, and a cover letter. That way I can have some people at Viable Paradise look the package over and give me advice before I start hunting down agents.

Viable Paradise, if you don't know, is the fancy-pants writer's workshop I'm attending in early October. I'm almost set up -- I still need to get my flight tickets for the trip between Boston and Martha's Vineyard, but everything else is pretty much in place. I've been in contact with a number of my fellow students, and they all seem to be good eggs. There's a good chance that this is going to be a watershed moment in my life -- to say I'm anxious about it is a radical understatement.

I also need to break down and get my student loan from the bank. I hate doing this, but given the choice between going further into debt and parasitizing off the fiscally-panicked missus isn't what you'd call a choice.

And I want to start thinking about how I could start doing copywriting or editing professionally. I'm told by people I trust that I have the skills -- I just don't have any idea how to find the work. Time to start investigating. Oafboy needs an income, you know?

It's like the old joke. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

A Taste Of The Novel

Just for giggles, here's a taste of the revisions I did today. All contents © Sean Craven.

from

The Ghost Rockers

I sat down on the walkway. There was no way to get comfortable on that cold metal grid. It ground against the bones in my ass. I leaned against the colorless stucco wall under a window and my eyes closed on their own.

It was the sound of heavy staggering footsteps that woke me. My neck was stiff and my butt was numb. When I saw the figure coming toward me I rolled to my feet and stamped to get the blood flowing again.

He – it – was only approximately human. It had two heads, one set centered on its shoulders, the smaller one crowding against it back and to the left. As it got closer I could see that the broad torso was actually two bodies fused together. One arm was normal, the other too big, with an extra elbow and a hand that had more fingers than I could count in a glance. It had a blanket wrapped around its waist, partially concealing three legs.

“Let’s just get out of here,” the little head said. It had short brown hair and a receding hairline. “We don’t know him, he could have a gun or something.”

“Tell you what. If you’re scared you can stay here and wait for me,” the center head said.

“You don’t have to be mean.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a little bitch.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey boy,” the front head said. “You must be lost, huh?” He grinned at me, big yellow teeth in a red face. He held up his small hand. “I bet you got lost and now you’re scared, right?”

The brown haired head was just visible over his shoulder. “I think I seen this guy somewhere,” he said.

Oh, shit. He was right.

“Shut the fuck up,” the blonde head said, then looked at me. “Hey, I do know you, don’t I?”

This was when a smart person would lie.

“Yeah, I think we ran into each other before.” I looked right in the blonde head’s eyes.

“Wait a minute, it’s starting to come back to me,” the blonde head said. “I think I remember some fuckin Nazi likes to throw people out their beds is what I think I remember. Fuckin little Hitler shitler thinks its fun to fuck with people just trying to stay warm. That’s you, right? You’re that guy? Fuckin fancy department store guy?” He stepped forward. His ugly hand dragged its clustered knuckles on the walkway, then whipped up to stroke his chin.

I kept my face still and my gaze steady.

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be me. Arnie and Jeff, right?”

Initiation

Time to add another row of tabs...

So I've been accepted to the Viable Paradise writer's workshop. Been snooping around, started to exchange Twitters with a few people. Yesterday, just for shits and giggles, I decided to make a post about some of the reasons I was feeling nervous about attending. Nothing like a comprehensive list, just a self-mocking bit of humor.

Well.

There was what might reasonably be called an outpouring of empathy, sympathy, and support in response. Some people offered advice and comfort, others were glad to see that someone else felt their trepidations.

Of course you know me -- I am all about the paradoxical reaction. The message that I got from this was that my joking about my nerves? I wasn't fucking joking. I actually am terrified. I've never ever done anything like this in my life and I am gonna be vulnerable. And I don't trust vulnerable. Vulnerable gets you fucking hurt.

I've been reading blog posts by people who have been through experiences like Viable Paradise or Clarion. Yesterday I went through two particularly good ones -- here's Julia Dvorin on Viable Paradise and The Ferrett on Clarion -- and as a result my growing sense of unease came to full fruition and I plunged into the depths for a bit.

This was because some of the writing advice, particularly that in the Ferrett's piece, made me feel tremendously insecure. Lemme be honest. I've got a lot invested in my novel. I have spent four years on it so far. I've written literally hundreds -- probably well over a thousand -- pages of material that I've had to discard. I am in what we might call a financially untenable situation -- quite literally hovering on the brink of penury, and rather than focus on finding a way to make a living I have devoted the majority of my energy to the novel. (As an aside, this is a decision that is fully supported by the missus, my friends, and my family -- everyone around me is in agreement that I'm doing the right thing. I'm still scared.)

And recently I've started to feel that it's close to finished.

Well, the Ferrett wrote of how he'd been told that he relied too heavily on plot. "Silly fellow," I thought. "Such a thing could never happen to an inept plotter such as myself." And then later, he wrote about how characters needed to have goals and needed to consistantly make decisions in order to achieve those goals.

It would be at that point that my pathetic house of cards collapsed.

Shit, shit, shit. I thought about some of the criticisms I've gotten on the novel, thought about the number of people who started it and didn't just read the whole thing straight through the way they were supposed to. People who have finished it have been uniform in their praise, but a lot of people just sort of drifted...

And that was why. Because my character drifts through much of the novel.

I recently read a novel by Charlie Stross called Saturn's Children. I had to force my way through it, never really got into the thing. It was clever, it was funny, it was full of interesting details about his future society and I just didn't like it. When I was done I spend a few minutes thinking hard and I was quite pleased with myself when I figured out why.

The drama in the story was derived from the perils faced by the lead character. Physical danger. She was fighting to save her life.

And she had a shit life, with no visible redemption on the horizon. Yeah, the book has a happy ending -- but it falls flat, because that happy ending hadn't been promised to the reader.

And that dynamic is at work in my novel. It's not as bad as it is in Saturn's Children. My lead character does have friends, does have pleasures in his life -- but...

A big part of the problem is that the book is a fusion of two seemingly-incompatable genres, the confessional autobiography and adventure fiction. It has the flavor of a horror novel and I do work the fear nerve here and there, but at its heart horror derives from victimhood -- as long as characters are standing up and fighting, you've got adventure rather than horror.

Confessional autobiography is dependant on the hook of the protagonist's issues. Whining and suffering are par for the course. In my novel, the whining and suffering are the result of mental illness. Fairly heavy stuff -- agitated depression and so on. When you're depressed, whining is the sickness itself. So there's no way to write honestly about that experience without portraying some whining.

But whiny heroes are anathema in adventure fiction. So writing honestly and writing compellingly are at odds here.

The story is about the lead character's process of healing and maturation, about him going from a completely bleak existance where the thing he wants most is death and it is denied him, to a place of strength and purpose. Writing this story has changed everything from my sense of self to my relationship with the missus. It has been tremendously healthy for me. It has become the central focus of my life and I'm the better for it.

So when I realized that the lead character's miserable passivity at the start of the novel was going to drive away a lot of readers -- that it was a flaw, not a feature and that it might well have driven me-the-reader away -- it hit me on a very root level. It's not just a book, it's my fucking life. And I'd turned my life into a book that sucked.

"But, but, but," I whined to myself, "the way the tension jacks up one step at a time and by the end of the book he's not passive anymore and..." Dependence on plot over story.

"But, but, but," I whined to myself. "The start of the book is funny! The same person in my writing group that said he wouldn't want to read about a suicidal character changed his mind when he saw how funny it was!" Dependence on humor over story.

Dependence on style over story. Dependence on detail over story. Unless the character wants something and works for it, there isn't a real story!

Oh, christ, I'm fucked. I thought of all the books I loved that didn't have a real story and you know what? Didn't help me. That wasn't the kind of book I was trying to write.

"But, but, but," I said to myself. "I was totally helpless at that point in my life. I didn't have any hopes. I wasn't working toward any goals..."

Waitaminnit...

I...

Holy shit. Could it be that that I'd underestimated myself? Moi?

Well, ask the missus about that one.

I thought back and I realized that even at the worst of times -- and they were bad -- that I had still struggled with art. I had a typewriter set up on a desk in my room. I went through sketchbooks like they were floss, you just use some up every day if you don't want your teeth to rot out of your head.

I knew that I sucked, but I still showed my stuff off. And I'd go to a friend's house and find that some doodle I'd done on a notepad had been put up on the refrigerator. The artists I knew seemed to regard me as being of the tribe.

And I also realized that what I'd written in the novel was true enough to life for the traces of that ambition and that effort to be right there.

The lead character can feel hopeless -- as long as the reader knows there's hope for him.

And all of a sudden I saw how questions that some readers have had about motivation were neatly answered. And how this could be made to dovetail perfectly with the fantastic elements of the story -- how he is drawn into the other world as a direct result of his goals and decisions rather than just falling down the rabbit hole. How there were scenes already written that just needed to be tweaked to take this into account.

I'm not going to have to tear the whole structure down. I just need to go in and retrofit the foundation. It's doable -- hell, it probably isn't going to be that hard now that I understand what's what.

There are a few phrases that come up over and over again when people talk about workshops. My writing pal Allison (who's the current reader who is most prone to point out these root issues in my work -- she drives me crazy sometimes but I generally wind up coming around to her point of view) is in Nebraska going through it right now and it's an ecstatic thing for her, a real pleasure to behold.

People talk in terms of boot camp. In terms of tribe. There's a culty vibe going on here...

I'm thinking it's an initiation. A time of trial. A rite of passage. This is one of the fundamental human activities, and it's one that many of us have been denied. I've certainly felt as if I've missed out on something important. To find your purpose, hone your skills, have the elders put you to the test and force you through the rituals --

I want this. I need this. And what I went through yesterday, from smirky post to the voices of unmet friends to the pits of self-loathing and despair to a renewed sense of strength... I think that was a taste of what's in store for me. I think I've got a better idea of what I'm facing.

I can hardly wait.

And now for something completely different.

I'm not a photographer. Never took snapshots. But the last couple of years I've started using photography as part of my artistic process. Yesterday I took a shot of Amanda so as to have a quick graphic for my post. Here's what I started out with.

It took me less than five minutes to get this. Crop, convert to LAB color, add three adjustment layers -- Curves, Brightness & Contrast, and Levels -- throw down a little Unsharp Mask, and done. I even had the thrilling realization that you can adjust the opacity on Adjustment Layers, which makes them much more flexible and subtle -- I'll use that concept a lot in the future.

What I mean is, my illustration skills also work on photographs! When I start taking Digital Photography this fall, I think I'm gonna hit the ground running.

So How's The Novel Doing?

Another of my late-period nudes. When I first began studying drawing, I went through three consecutive semesters of life-drawing. I got to the point where I was pretty good -- I've done a number of drawings that have been mistaken for photographs and most of them came from that period.

I don't have any of those. One night when the missus and I were just friends, I brought a portfolio of my best drawings over to show to her, since she was my pal the sculptor. On the way home I waited for a bus with my portfolio leaning against the sign pole. When the bus came I went to grab it and it wasn't there.

Anyway, since then I haven't put in the sheer time necessary to do really accurate life drawings, and as a result I hated what little life drawing I did. But now I'm looking back at this stuff and, as in yesterday's piece, the keyword for me is charming. Yes, it's badly lacking in accurate anatomy and the niceties of observation. But now I think there's something really sweet about it.

This one was particularly embarrassing for me to draw because it fairly clearly shows that I found the model attractive. I've always had an easy time drawing women who didn't have a particular appeal for me, especially your lean dancer/gymnast types. I've felt as if there's something wrong about drawing a woman you find attractive...

... what a load of horseshit. I never thought Renoir or Rubens or even Frazetta were sleazebags because of the erotic content of their work -- why should I feel that way about myself? Oh, well. Growing up is hard to do.

The novel is doing quite well, actually. Right now the structure is all in place and no major changes need to be made. I'm more than halfway through the first round of pure line edits, aka draft four -- I just finished chapter twenty today. And I'm eight chapters into the second round of line edits, aka draft five.

The reason for this is that I'm powering through my last draft by myself, then submitting that to the writer's groups, then doing a further revision based on the criticisms I receive.

The Monday night group should be starting up any minute now; I can hardly wait. They'll take forty pages a week -- and I'm gonna be a sleaze and make those pages eleven-point type. I've been taking that from Al for years. Now I shall have my revenge.

The Homework Club, on the other hand, has a fifteen-page maximum. So it's pretty much one, maybe two chapters a week. Which will drive me nuts, but these guys are pros.

There's something weird happening in the Homework Club, though. It's as though we've hit some kind of critical mass and all of a sudden it seems as if all of us are moving up to the next level. I'm seeing it in the edits and the work that the others are submitting and I'm feeling it in my own writing process.

It's interesting. Up until now I've regarded the process of revision as one of perfecting the work. Now this is a subtle difference but an important one -- now I feel as if my job is to prepare the work for the reader.

For instance, I've mentioned that I try and fully experience the scenes I write in as many senses as possible, and then describe it in writing. Previously I would have worked hard to bring those visions to the page as completely as possible. Now I find myself throwing out one beautiful detail after another because they are of no use to the reader. If it doesn't help the reader get the story, it doesn't belong on the page.

It's amazing, the amount of verbiage needed to lubricate an ideas passage from thought to prose. Getting rid of those words feels great.

Up until now, my revisions have always added material -- because my problem was incompleteness. But the story of the novel is now complete. So now revision is partially a matter of trimming the excess. I'm losing one page in twenty or so. Probably a bit more than that.

And by working on more than one part of the novel at the same time, I'm finding that I can hold the whole thing in my head, which allows me to find places where information is duplicated, places where hints should be dropped, etc.

I'm also realizing that what I'm doing stems very directly from my experiences writing short fiction and scripts. I've learned techniques of compression from writing short fiction -- say what you will about my stuff, it's typically very, very conceptually dense. And scripts have taught me clarity -- when you write a script, it's part of someone's job and you're doing everyone a favor if you make it fucking difficult to misunderstand.

The result is something that is both rich in information and easy to read. Which pleases me no end.

What's really exciting is that as each chapter goes by, I think to myself, "And this is where it really kicks in." It is far from a pure action novel -- the lead character doesn't get into a fight until more than a third of the way through the book and he spends two chapters in the hospital as a result of that fight -- but the plot keeps twisting and going deeper. The excitement builds continuously.

It doesn't have a narrative arc -- it's a right triangle, straight up forty-five degrees from the base to the apex. There was a while where it was like a hammock, tight at the ends and saggy in the middle. No more; you could launch a rocket off this thing.

I go through phases of thinking it's just a hack fantasy/horror novel, but that's not true. It's focused more strongly on prose and character than anything else -- it's just that those characters live in a fantastic world. No good guys, no bad guys, just people who succeed and fail at being able to live with one another and themselves. Yeah, it has the same story bones underlying it as every other fiction -- but I think it's something that hasn't been seen before.

Despite its mainstream/literary qualities, its focus on social realism and convincing pictures of mental illness, drug use, and the life of the artist, I'm bringing in everything from After Man-style speculative evolution, surrealism, quest fantasy, comic-book superpowers, a view of the afterlife that's intended to be convincing enough to support a cult, a haunted house story, and genuinely visionary moments -- and everything latches together, flows smoothly, and makes perfect sense in context.

I'm feeling pretty proud right now. But don't worry. Give me another month or two and I'll be back to excoriating myself for my creative inadequacies.

I promise.

Not A Bad Workday

What can I say? Insects-as-phallic-architecture are fun! I think that two of these should be plenty for the magazine, though.

So that makes two good work days in a row. Yesterday I blew off working on the illustrations for Swill in order to sink my teeth back into the novel. I revised four chapters, nearly forty pages of manuscript. Now I'm a month ahead of the Tuesday night group and I'm ready to rock when the Monday night group reconvenes. So now I'm a third of the way through the fourth revision.

Today I managed to work another illustration for Swill from concept to finish. (It's the up top there.) I'm getting better and better at working my new set of tricks and it's fun to see how things develop. And now I'm down to four more illustrations before I go. One a day, oafboy. One a day. Then you can do the novel full time by the end of the week.

Speaking of which, I did the fifth revision of chapter one as well, the version that's going to be my submission to agents. I want to revise the manuscript as I get the criticisms, and hopefully it won't take me too long to get caught up.

By handling it this way I can track the novel as a whole in order to make sure that everything ties together properly and that any changes I make in any one section can be integrated with the work as a whole.

Now this first chapter has stuff in it that dates back right to the beginning of the project, back when it was a novella about a haunted garage band. I figured that it was going to be a line edit rather than a real revision.

I was wrong; there was so much red ink on the page it looked as though I'd butchered a guinea pig on the manuscript. It was great -- I hit a new level of skill in omitting needless words and started to see sentences that had been in place for years, that had gone by many readers without complaint, and I say that They Fucking Said Nothing, that they were verbal lubricant to keep my flow of ideas going while I was writing.

And that's the thing. Those words needed to be written -- they just didn't need to be read. The chapter went from nine pages to eight pages and it reads so much better now. Dense with information and yet it goes down quite easily. I'm now in the part of the ego roller-coaster where I'm thinking very highly of the novel. It's a pleasant feeling. But give me another month and I'll be hating it again...

Here's a taste.

“Hey, we weren’t talking about you, man, we weren’t talking about you!”

The kid who spoke had his hands up and his friends looked freaked out. I stopped and blinked.

“Sorry, dude,” I said. “I’ve been kind of going through it lately.” I could feel my tremor starting up – my hands were shaky and there was a quiver in my voice.

Fuck those kids. Soft little overprivileged shits, all lip and no spine. They hadn’t shown me respect. They just didn’t want any trouble. I should have gone for them. Back in my hometown there’d be blood on the pavement by now, probably mine. San Costas wasn’t a city – it was a goddamned petting zoo.

I May Have Figured Out One Of The Problems & Some Casting Suggestions From The Missus

I'm not pleased with myself. This isn't a horrible illustration but it isn't a pro-quality reconstruction.

I've forgotten how to draw while I've been busy making pretty pictures. I need to hit the sketchbook on a regular basis.

This is the depressing part of having a large and involved skill set -- while you're getting good at one skill, another atrophies.

So I may have mentioned that I've been having a bit of a problem with my crazy over the last year or so -- basically, since I started seeing signs of success in my creative life. I've been blaming it on self-destructive tendencies. This is true, but it dawned on me last night that there's something more than that going on.

See, the way I handled my crazy before was to carefully monitor all the aspects of my life that contributed positively or negatively to my mental health. Sleeping, eating, exercise -- the basics, you know?

But since things have started taking off for me, I haven't been thinking about that stuff at all, except to complain about my self-abuse. So it's time to start eating three meals a day, making sure that I get to bed at a reasonable hour and stay in bed a reasonable amount of time even if I'm not sleeping. It's time to make sure I get a walk in every day.

And my irritation with my poor draftsmanship is part of this as well. In a previous post I mentioned that I needed to work on structure and balance in my creative life; this applies to my whole life.

So I ate breakfast today. I ate a reasonable lunch, so I'm going to be able to eat dinner. Gonna take a walk as soon as this is posted. I've done some drawing today, done some writing. And now the only deadline breathing down my neck is for Swill. Time to try and figure out how to organize myself. How to make proper use of my time. It'll make me healthier, happier, and a more functional artist.

Damnit.

Anyway, I mentioned to Karen that Traumador had left a comment on my site suggesting that if I was lucky, someday Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks might play the lead in a movie based on the novel. This was kind of hilarious, as the lead character is based on me and let's just say there isn't much resemblance.

She had some interesting suggestions. Willem Dafoe was her first -- and the thing to remember is that this isn't based on physical resemblance. It's based on someone having the emotional range to pull off the story -- they have to be able to do smart, crazy, nice, and menacing. They have to be able to be both scary and vulnerable. So Willem Dafoe is a good one. I thought Ed Norton might be good. Maybe Brendan Frasier -- I think he has acting chops they haven't asked him to use yet. John Turturro.

But this morning she came up with one out of the blue that sounds good to me -- Alan Tudyk. He played Wash in Firefly? Karen recently saw something where he gave good menace. I can see him in the role. 's kind of a fun little game.

Actually, now that I think of it, you know who I'd really like? Ron Perlman.

Of course if it sells, they probably will have Tom Cruise play the lead.

Or Keanu Reaves.

Mildly Petulant, No Sign Of Frenzy: And Some Thoughts On The Upcoming Novel

Here's an example of the tailpieces I've been doing for Swill. There are one or two that need to be replaced but they're pretty much done. I think they add something to the sauce.

This is just crazy, isn't it? I've recently the full run of Weirdo magazine -- R. Crumb's long-running Mad-modeled humor anthology and a high point of Western culture, you slaggardly gobnards, I'd start pimping it but I'd get out names like Peter Bagge and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and then wake up in the middle of the night going, "Oh, shit, what about Elinor Norflus? How could I forget about Elinor Norflus?" -- but the qualities that give this one a Wierdo feel are totally the product of an Illustrator algorithm. I had nothing to do with those scratchy little lines -- I just picked them out.

Before I start barging around today's blog post, I've got a confession to make. I've been sucking lately. Doing a lot of work that has not proven to be anything I'd care to show to the public.

I'm going to try something different, something involving self-promotion. I'm going to go to a local store that sells bones and dried insects and stuffed animals and so on and ask them to sell me a bunch of their detritus. I'll bring a presentation folder to leave with them and a portfolio so I can show them my paleo art.

I will ask them if they'd be willing to sell me a bunch of detritus. The broken, the shop-worn, the stray bits and pieces. Trash I can scan in on my new scanner. In fact, now that I think of it I'm going to try and scan in as many different objects and so on as I can. Today I go to get the glass for my scanner.

Because I need to bust out. There's so much that's already been done on the magazine and here I am freezing up. I need to break free of this crap and start cranking out the pages. Bim bam boom. So a fresh and crazy dose of source material should hopefully get me going again. I'll call it a different series and do more of the Rorschach Dreams when they come to me. Right now obeying those rules is producing bad work.

I've also been thinking a lot about volume two of the novel. It's a bit problematic at this stage and here's why.

Right now, what I've got for the second and third volumes of the novel is as follows. Third volume, an outline and a rough draft of the beginning.

For the second volume, the one I need to work on next, I've got a number of scenes written along with the rough draft of the climax. So I know where I'm going and I know roughly what I need to do to get there. This book needs to provide the linkage between what I've done and what I know for sure I'm going to do.

It's all a mess right now. I've decided to try experimenting with conventional, structured outlining techniques I learned in multimedia courses.

I'm going to figure out each plot line, figure out exactly what needs to happen to bring them to their proper stage of ferment by the end of the book, and then look at all those lists together and start weaving them. Put 'em on post-it notes, clear off some wall space and use filing cards and pushpins...

I hope it works.

I hope it works.